In the field of microbiology, particularly the fields of biological engineering, genetic engineering and the like, researchers execute experiment operations using cultured cells so as to verify their theories and experiments. These basic experiment operations include, but are not limited to,
1, culturing cells, particularly reproducing the cells in a liquid culture medium determined by one or more components;
2, measuring cell density;
3, separating the cells from the liquid culture medium;
4, re-suspending the cells using fresh liquid;
5, operating the cells by means of a chemical way, an electric way or other physical ways, for example, introducing genetic materials such as plasmids or oligonucleotides;
6, sterilizing an instrument using alcohol or other solutions; and
7, cleaning the instrument using water.
A current mainstream experiment flow refers to sequentially completing the above steps in small batches by means of manual operations. Commonly used traditional experiment instruments include: a test tube, a shake flask, a shaker, a culture dish, a cuvette, an injector, a pipettor, a centrifugal machine, a filter membrane and the like. When multiple turns of experiment operations or experiment operations on a plurality of samples are executed, it is necessary to consume a great amount of time and labour.
Although a certain degree of automation can be obtained by combining traditional instruments into a mini plant and adding a control assembly, the solution has the defects that each traditional instrument is not designed for combination, mutual specifications do not match, the combined mini plant is too large for a traditional biochemical laboratory, and a relatively large amount of needed cell culture fluid will make raw experimental materials too expensive.